Chapter 4: The Version of Him That Came Back

We ended up on the patio with glasses sweating in the spring air and the late sun making everything look kinder than it was. Beth, Kevin, and Carrie, Sue in and out of the kitchen, and Andrew telling us about a life that sounded, to the girl I was then, as if it belonged in a movie I wasn’t cool enough to be cast in.

He was visiting from Los Angeles, where he was almost finished with college. The dorky school band drummer was now an actual drummer in a rock band. He bartended on weekends, which he described as both a job and a recreational sport. I sat there in a towel that I refused to surrender and listened like the words were postcards from a country I had only seen in pictures on other people’s phones. My world was still high school hallways, a community college application, and a boy who had used the word love as a doorstop on his way out. Andrew’s world had tattoos, late nights, and a city that did not care if you had been dumped in a parking lot on Friday.

I kept staring. I did not mean to. My eyes found the ink on his arms, the way his mouth moved when he was about to make a joke, and the fact that his long hair was pushed back like he had done it with his hands and not a plan. When he looked at me in the middle of a story and smiled, I blushed and looked away so fast I almost pulled a muscle in my own dignity. Carrie caught me doing it. Of course she did, and she gave me a look that made her eyebrows climb and could have been classified as an accusation, an acknowledgment, or both. She mouthed “what the fuck at me.”

Kevin did not like the tattoos. Apparently, this was an ongoing conversation that had started almost three years ago, when Andrew came home for Christmas with the first two. Now his arms were covered, and Kevin made his thoughts known in the way dads say things they have already decided are true.

“That is going to follow you into interviews,” Kevin said. “You can play dress-up in a band all you want. The rest of the world still asks you to pull your sleeves down and look like you can be trusted.”